Bear

In the summer of my twentieth year, I worked briefly as a bear-skinner in the mountains of Wyoming. I knew nothing about bears, and I had never flayed an animal. But I moved through life back then with a dauntlessness born of cluelessness, and I had spent all my money—three hundred dollars—in Denver, on an old car, so I needed to make some more.

On the test drive, the car, a 1960 Rambler American, had run fine until it died (out of gas, the seller said), so I bought it. The next day, heading north, I drove into a June snowstorm. I turned a knob on the dash, hoping for heat, and got blasted instead by an AM-radio station: a man reading a list of employment opportunities—roughneck work in the oil fields, mostly. Then he said, “Meat cutter wanted in Dubois. Need not have own knives.” I met that qualification.

Dubois was a rough little outpost cradled in spectacular country between the Wind River and Absaroka mountain ranges. I figured I got the job just because I showed up. The wage was something less than five dollars an hour, but I found free shelter nearby—a dank little plywood shack—and the kid who constituted the rest of the meat-cutting staff showed me a freezer from which I could steal choice cuts of moose and elk.

Dubois Cold Storage, where I worked, was a game-processing business that catered to hunters, and, since most of the clientele came from afar and killed for sport, there was always good meat left behind. But the big-game hunting season was in the fall. In summer, only bears were in season, and nobody ate bears, the kid said: “not even Indians.” Then he slipped me a frozen brick of moose burger.

The next morning, there was a bear waiting for me. A vacationing sheriff from Florida had shot him at the town dump, picturing the bear’s head on his wall, or the bear’s rug at his feet. My boss agreed that these trophies would be magnificent. But when the sheriff left the boss began bad-mouthing him: hunting at the dump was unmanly, and the bear was pitifully small. The boss took me into the back room to see. The bear hung from a meat hook, with his head dangling over a drain. He was not a big bear, it was true, but he was an impressive presence nonetheless.

“He’s all yours,” the boss told me. I elicited more specific instructions. “Get the rug off,” he said. I allowed that this was my first bear. “Same deal, basically, as a rabbit or squirrel,” he said, which didn’t help. He told me not to worry about the paws and the head. “Just cut cuffs and collar, and I’ll saw them off,” he said, and left.

There was a single knife on a metal table beside the bear. I started on one side of the rib cage, pulling back on the thick, oily fur, and sliding the knife along the underside of the hide. The animal’s coat was bound to its flesh by a webbing of light fat, and I quickly got the idea of peeling and slicing, to strip it away. I saw that, done properly, this should be a nearly bloodless job, the rug falling away, the meat sheathed in pale membrane. But I made a mess of it, leaving open wounds in the flesh and gashes in the rug.

I felt bad desecrating the bear. But I’d never pretended that I knew how to do this, and, between the sheriff’s preening over his trophy and my boss’s contempt for it, I resented being made party to what seemed a useless waste. As a meat-eater, I believed, I should be able to deal with butchery, but my encounter with the bear had nothing to do with the food chain. When I was done with this perfect creature, what was left of it—the meat and the bones—would be returned to the dump as garbage.

To take an animal apart is to see how wondrously it’s constructed, and the more I peeled back the bear’s coat the more familiar the underlying anatomy appeared: like a little man, a lean figure of solid muscle, every ripple of it recognizably like our own. When the boss came in with an electric saw, I stepped out for fresh air, and when I returned I found the kid, staring at the headless, pawless body twisting on its hook, like a spectator at a hanging. “You see why the Indians don’t eat them?” he said.

On lunch break, I found another job, as a yard laborer at the sawmill. The boss at Cold Storage let me go without wasting breath on a goodbye. The kid walked me out and, as we passed the freezer, said, “Want some meat?” I filled my daypack with elk steaks. I couldn’t stand to think that they might go to waste. ♦

Philip Gourevitch has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1995, and a staff writer since 1997.